Fountain of Youth 5: Michio Kaku on Time and Immortality

Pillars of Creation. Star birth in the Eagle Nebula. Hubble Telescope, 1995.  NASA, ESA, STScI, J. Hester and P. Scowen (Arizona State University)

Quantum physicists increasingly weigh in on matters originally confined to the provinces of religion.  Michio Kaku, the famous string theorist and popularizer of quantum scientific theories who teaches at City College of New York, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York is working on the Theory of Everything, which even eluded Einstein.  It's a very popular quest at present, attempting to unite the forces of gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong force and the weak force.  

Fountain of Youth 4: Life Extension is tied to the Reproductive System

Roundworm life extension.

Surprise! Sex and death are connected. I09 has picked up a report from Nature based on Stanford University research conducted on the life extension of roundworms.  Scientists have figured out how to make the worms live 30 per cent longer through genetic drug therapy, namely, by blocking the activity of certain genes.  But the therapy only works if the worms are still fertile, confirming that life extension is tied to the reproductive system.  For the i09 report go here for the original Nature report, go here.  For the Stanford announcement, go here, which lets you read a bit about the research without paying for the article if you don't have subscription access to Nature.

Fountain of Youth 3: David Eagleman at the Museums of Curiosity

 Sum, by David Eagleman. Pantheon, 2009.

On June 14, BBC Four interviewed Neil Gaiman, David Eagleman and Sarah Millican on the last episode of its current series for the radio show Museums of Curiosity. You can listen to the show between June 14 and June 20 here. After that, it goes offline. David Eagleman, best-selling author of Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives , and neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, Texas described his perception of time and the anticipated merger of science and religion.

Hallelujah

From the 1929 film.

I turned in my doctoral dissertation today!

Fountain of Youth 2: Neil Gaiman at the Museums of Curiosity

Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

Yesterday, BBC Four interviewed Neil Gaiman, David Eagleman and Sarah Millican on the last episode of its current series for the radio show Museums of Curiosity.  You can listen to the show between June 14 and June 20 here.  After that, it goes offline.  Neil Gaiman is the award-winning British writer whose work on DC's Vertigo comic The Sandman ran from 1989 to 1996, in which he portrayed the Sandman, the master of the realm of human dreams, as a postmodern epic hero. 

Fountain of Youth 1: Why is Noir the Style of the Future and Immortality?

Blade Runner (1982).

Why are there so many films about the future that depend upon a resuscitation of film noir style? Neo-noir has been a revived favourite standard for thrillers from the 1980s to the 2000s, but why is science fiction a flourishing noir sub-genre? Is it just the huge impact of cyberpunk, related to the Tech Revolution? Perhaps science fiction from the 1950s to 1970s, like Philip K. Dick’s neo-gnostic and post-apocalyptic works fed readily into neo-noir styled films based on his work, like 1982’s Blade Runner? Or is there something about noir style specifically that speaks to how we think of the future and Blade Runner's concepts of mortality and conflicted humanity?

Early Days of the Web 1: A Site that Broke the Mould

Mobius Strip II, 1963. M. C. Escher.

If you want to get a taste of the ideas floating around during the heady days when the Internet was new, visit the defunct site, The Strip, named after a Möbius strip.  This site, created by graduates in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1996 to 1999, has been left as a testament to what people thought the Web would do for us.